Barker, Clive - Books of Blood Vol. 2.pdf

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Barker, Clive - Books of Blood Vol. 2
at the heart of the discourse, is dread. While the nature of God, and the
possibility of eternal life go undiscussed, we happily chew over the minutiae
of misery. The syndrome recognizes no boundaries; in bath-house and
seminar-room alike, the same ritual is repeated. With the inevitability of a
tongue returning to probe a painful tooth, we come back and back and back
again to our fears, sitting to talk them over with the eagerness of a hungry
man before a full and steaming plate.
While he was still at university, and afraid to speak, Stephen Grace was
taught to speak of why he was afraid. In fact not simply to talk about it, but
to analyze and dissect his every nerve ending, looking for tiny terrors.
In this investigation, he had a teacher: Quaid.
It was an age of gurus; it was their season. In universities up and down
England young men and
women were looking east and west for people to follow like lambs;
Steve Grace was just one of many. It
was his bad luck that Quaid was the Messiah he found.
They’d met in the Student Common Room.
“The name’s Quaid,” said the man at Steve’s elbow at the bar.
“Oh.”
“You’re —?”
“Steve Grace.”
Quaid ordered a double brandy. He didn’t look that well off, and a dou-
ble brandy would have just
about crippled Steve’s finances for the next week. Quaid downed it
quickly, and ordered another.
“What are you having?”
Steve was nursing half a pint of luke-warm lager, determined to make it
last an hour.
“Nothing for me.”
“Yes you will.”
“I’m fine.”
“Another brandy and a pint of lager for my friend.”
Steve didn’t resist Quaid’s generosity. A pint and a half of lager in his
unfed system would help no
end in dulling the tedium of his oncoming seminars on ‘Charles Dickens
as a Social Analyst’. He yawned
just to think of it.
“Somebody ought to write a thesis on drinking as a social activity.”
Quaid studied his brandy a moment, then downed it.
“Or as oblivion,” he said.
Steve looked at the man. Perhaps five years older than Steve’s twenty.
The mixture of clothes he wore
Hair, a dirty blond.
Quaid, Steve decided, could have passed for a Dutch dope-pusher..He
wore no badges. They were the common currency of a student’s obses-
sions, and Quaid looked
naked without something to imply how he took his pleasures. Was he a
gay, feminist, save-the-whale
campaigner; or a fascist vegetarian? What was he into, for God’s sake?
“You should have been doing Old Norse,” said Quaid.
“Why?”
“They don’t even bother to mark the papers on that course,” said Quaid.
Steve hadn’t heard about this. Quaid droned on.
“They just throw them all up into the air. Face up, an A. Face down, a
B.”
Oh, it was a joke. Quaid was being witty. Steve attempted a laugh, but
Quaid’s face remained
unmoved by his own attempt at humour.
“You should be in Old Norse,” he said again. “Who needs Bishop Ber-
keley anyhow. Or Plato. Or —”
“Or?”
“It’s all shit.”
“Yes.”
was not the done thing. You
either smoked Gauloises, Camel or nothing at all.
“It’s not true philosophy they teach you here,” said Quaid, with unmis-
takable contempt.
“Oh?”
“We get spoon-fed a bit of Plato, or a bit of Bentham —no real analysis.
It’s got all the right markings
of course. It looks like the beast: it even smells a bit like the beast to the
uninitiated.”
“What beast?”
“Philosophy. True Philosophy. It’s a beast, Stephen. Don’t you think?”
“I hadn’t -”
“It’s wild. It bites.”
He grinned, suddenly vulpine. “Yes. It bites,” he replied. Oh, that
pleased him. Again, for luck:
“Bites.”
Stephen nodded. The metaphor was beyond him. “I think we should feel
mauled by our subject.”
Quaid was warming to the whole subject of mutilation by education. “We
should be frightened to juggle
the ideas we should talk about.”

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